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Indoctrination
Burden of Proof
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
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iiii think you might be projecting your own experiences to encompass the experiences of all kida who grew up in religious households.
and not only that, but you're making some pretty huge generalizations about how religious people think.
Don't you condescend to me. I wouldn't have posted that if it wasn't a shared experience. And do you really think that just because not everybody has it so bad that it makes it ok to treat a child like that?
Not that I agree with Pants Man, but I think teaching a child to reject anything that might be outside of their experience out of hand to be just as bad. In fact, exactly the same.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
You're fucking delusional if a) you think that's what atheists tell their kids b) that's not taught in school science class, and c) that its even slightly as damaging as believing a big bloke in the sky will kill you for being born to the wrong people.
i'm not trying to condescend to you, and i definately don't think that your experience was okay or in any way justified. all i'm saying is that your experience isn't even remotely similar to how millions of other kids were raised in religious families. you're using your own personal experience and then projecting it onto everyone else.
my family, for instance, is Episcopal. but my experience, while still probably "indoctrination" by your standards, was totally different. i was taught the Bible stories and learned about Jesus and heaven and hall and all that stuff, but it was never put into the context of anybody else. i was always told that people were responsible for their own actions in the eyes of God, and that that relationship is something that each individual person has to cultivate. basically, you can't force someone to be a Christian, that's a decision that they have to make for themselves; and by that same token, you can't "convince" God to let you into heaven or save you from eternal damnation or whatever, that's His choice.
and i really don't think that my religious belief hampers my ability to think logically. that's just an easy out if you disagree with someone.
Yes, I remember they granted Salah al-Din that place in their kooky echelon.
Limbo. Generous.
Aren't you then projecting your experience onto "millions of other kids" in religious families? I'm assuming you haven't actually lived in every, or any, Episcopalian households apart from your own long enough to gauge to what degree religion has had a positive or negative effect on their children's overall development.
... that's not what I said. I was commenting more on the attitude of the thread.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
you just proved my point. both stories are completely anecdotal, and you can't generalize using either. i don't assume that all religious kids had the same upbringing that i did, and Cat shouldn't assume that all religious kids had the same upbringing that she did.
okay, i see what you're saying. but i when i was little, i was told about the Bible and Jesus and all that good stuff, and then told to come to my own conclusions later on. that's why i was given the chance to either take or give up the chance to be Confirmed. i don't think that's really such a bad way to go about things.
well its a bloody good thing I don't, then! I'm illustrating What Can Go Wrong here, and stating that the risk of that is more than early-life indoctrination is worth.
You get raised Amish until you're a teenager, and at some point they say "okay, for the next couple of years, you're not Amish. Go out and do whatever you want; drink, do drugs, use all the technology you can get your hands on, feel free to use the barn to party. After that, when you feel ready, you can decide whether or not you want to be Amish."
They have crazy-high retention rates, too.
Yes, and how do you suggest we go about doing this, without completely ripping up the Constitution?
Edit: Obviously things would be different over there, but still. How do we go about doing this without completely screwing over civil rights?
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Introduce science and philosophy to them when they're adults and they'll easily incorporate that into their lives. Tell them there was once a man who died on a cross so that they wouldn't be sent to a fiery dungeon after they die, but they still have to follow a certain set of rules anyway, and they might question where you got that idea.
yeah, and as long as it's used in that context i'm coll with it. teaching intelligent design in schools is just fucking retarded.
that said, i would say that 75% of the time i see it used nowadays is just to make fun of religion in general.
great, but it's still anecdotal. i can come up with an anecdotal reason for What Can Go Wrong here for a billion things, but since it'll still be anecdotal, it'll still be a crappy argument.
if you had statistics that said "early-life indoctrination is shown to have detrimental effects on childhood devleopment," that'd be one thing. but instead you're trying to use a personal story to prove your point.
what's ironic is that you're using a highly illogical and unscientific way of trying to make your argument that early-life religious indoctrination isn't worth the risk to the child.
If it's not such a bad way to go about things, then why do children tend to have the same religion as their parents? Most people are aware that the choice of religion for the vast majority of people on the planet (but not their own choice, I mean of course) was determined by nothing more than the accident of which family they were born into.
Indoctrination doesn't do much other than, well, indoctrinate. Might it not be better to not teach children your religion so you know that if they choose it then it's because that's what they wanted, rather than just because you indoctrinated them into choosing it?
There was a good article on salon (i think) abut rumspringa recently. And honestly, the threat of being shunned by your community and family is a far greater contributor to retention rates than anything else, closely followed by the kids' knowledge that an 8th grade education and a complete lack of familiarity with the broader culture (beyond the local bar scene) mean that they won't have a fun time if they really truly leave.
Why jump to 'we have to make a law'? We don't. A cultural shift is required, though. I'm not a fan of legislative solutions to social problems - i prefer to leave that tactic to the board conservatives.
because by not teaching your child anything, that's still conditioning then for something. do you see what i'm getting at? an inquisitive and smart kid is going to eventually make his or her own decision anyway. you're right, a dumb or lazy kid is going to probably stay the same religion as his or her own parents, but that cuts both ways; a lazy kid raised by a nonreligious family is just as likely to stay nonreligious as a lazy kid is to stay religious in a religious family.
since it doesn't matter either way because the kid is going to follow what the parent does anyway, it's ultimately up to the parents to decide what they want for their kids. you can't avoid that just by saying "figure it out for yourself"
oh man, i saw a documentary about rumspringa and it was fucked up. if you think college freshman are bad, amish kids doing rumspringa are about a billion times worse. the idea that these kids would somehow be able to find an identity for themselves outside of the religion that has isolated them from the rest of the world for 90% of their lives is ridiculous.
You're really missing the point. If a person is brought up religiously, it hampers his very capacity to work within a rational universe, since you've effectively raised him in an irrational one with overriding presumptions based on cultural fabrication.
uggghhh please stop trying to equate all relious people with fundamentalists. i don't think the world is flat, i don't believe in ID over evolution, i don't think the world is 8,000 years old, and i do think dinosaurs roamed the earth. just not at the same time as cavemen.
i can have the same scientific and analytical mind as anyone else, believe it or not. my religious upbringing didn't hamper me, and it's more than likely that it hasn't hampered millions of others. again, stop with the ridiculous generalizations.
But you acknowledge that if weren't for rational and empirical minds, you'd have never known otherwise. So why embrace the ideology that would have kept you in ignorance and deny that which would enlighten you?
Science as a Candle in the Dark.
some of the greatest scientific and philosophical minds the world has ever known were deeply religious.
Deeply religious? Or deeply scientific and philosophical, and religious by default for fear of being burned at the stake?
hahahahahahah okay
[HTML]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel[/HTML]
start there. holy crap dude. hahahahahahah
oops, my bad, here you go
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel
And I fail to observe anything in that article that suggests Mendel's discoveries were in any way religiously inspired.
Man, that's just sophistry.
Seeing as that's not what he's saying at all, I'm not surprised. He's saying that religion is not necessarily a detriment to rational thought. It can be, but then again, so can any ideology.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Well not literally "fearing for their lives," but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone from the Renaissance or Enlightenment Age who was staunchly secular. It's a dubious correlation to suggest that they were critical minds because they were religious.
No, a lot (most?) were indeed devout christians. But back then the whole science/religion divide wasn't as pronounced. All kinds of scientists were researching and experimenting with things using the scientific method, and to them it was basically learning about gods creations and all that jazz. Even guys like Gallileo were religious, even thought the church didn't take kindly to what he had to say.
Religion is so very strange to me, its like dealing with aliens. It is fundamentally mysterious to me, when I was a kid I thought for a while that everyone was faking just to fit in, that nobody *really* deep down believed these things. And frankly, I still dont understand it.
Further to that, there's no real way the initial assertion can be adequately refuted, largely because nobody is capable of reading minds, especially those of the dead. Any claim that Pants Man can make regarding scientists who professed to follow a religion can just as easily be brushed aside by Glyph again using the same claim that they had to under pressure.
Ironic that someone attempting to attack religion should use an assertion which is not fundamentally disprovable, as an attack.
Oh, but you're willing to strawman my argument? I never said being brought up religious makes it absolutely impossible to be a rational human being. Just like being racist doesn't make it impossible to have progressive ideas. But in the same vein, it does make it more difficult because you're having to make compromises between a pre-packaged set of beliefs and your own individual circumstance.
Not so. All I'm suggesting is that people make compromises because to do otherwise would be maladaptive. Just as Pants made a compromise that the world wasn't created in a week, thinkers throughout history - religious though they might have been - compromised absolute faith when necessary to suit their respective fields. They didn't just drop every part of their faith because they didn't have all the answers, just as we still don't have all the answers.
But they knew enough to know that what the evidence was telling them contradicted what they were raised to believe. And they made a conscious choice to trust what was in front of them. If I were to suggest that being blind is detrimental to functioning in a society where most people aren't blind, am I saying it's impossible? No. I see religion the same way, except that instead of dealing with a physical impairment, you're dealing with an understanding of the world that you've been taught to believe since childhood.
Sure, I may be a bit paranoid for it, but I'm glad my parents thought teaching critical thinking was more important than bringing me up as their religion. It didn't hurt my moral character any, and if anything made me far more interested in the tenents of their faith than most of the children I knew who went to church because they were forced.
*He was annoyed that I started crying and wanted to go home, too. God I can't wait to have kids.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Again, you're making an assertion which cannot be disproved. In this case, that the practitioners themselves even saw a contradiction between their beliefs and what they were observations of reality, whereby they had to make a break or "compromise" with their religion.
You say for example, that Pants man "makes a compromise" that the world wasn't created in a week. Even not being Christian myself, I can see how this is not inherently a compromise. It depends for example, on whether Pants Man takes the wording as literal or metaphorical, amongst other things. There is no inherent disjoint there. What's happening there is that the viewpoint of absolute literalist is being placed on Pants Man (and possibly being accepted as the only "legitimate" Christian viewpoint) and then being refuted as having to be compromised in order to accept current scientific thinking.